Chelsea Clinton on Monday said more must be done to encourage gender diversity in high-tech jobs, including finding role models for young girls who want to break into traditionally male-dominated math and science careers.

“There are fewer girls who are aspirational in the math and science fields in the United States than there were 20 years ago,” Clinton said during a panel discussion Monday at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. “We have significantly fewer women graduating with computer science degrees.

“We have significantly fewer women graduating with mechanical engineering degrees than we did in the mid and late 1980s,” Clinton said. “We’re really losing ground in this area, which is why we have such a frenetic focus.”

Clinton’s comments came during an event that focused on getting more girls interested in science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, careers. The event helped kick off this week’s Clinton Global Initiative America in Denver.

Women make up about half of the workforce in the United States but only about 26 percent of STEM workers, according to Census data.

The trend is one that panelists — Debbie Sterling, CEO of GoldieBlox; Danielle Feinberg, director of photography at Pixar Animation Studios; and Kari Byron, co-host of Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters — said needs to be reversed.

Feinberg said when she studied computer science at Harvard she was in classrooms that had between 5 percent and 10 percent women.

“It was really hard,” Feinberg said. “I would be in the science lab programming late at night and the guys would all get together and they would figure out all the secrets to the assignments. They wouldn’t share and, if I went over to ask a simple question, they would ignore me. I’m really excited to be involved in things like this because I want that girl to have friends.”

The conversation did not propose specific plans or new initiatives to increase the number of women in STEM fields, but pointed to the importance of engaging girls at an early age.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who many believe will run for president, was not at the event but spoke to participants in a video. She said the first time outside of the playground that anyone told her she could not do something because she was a girl was in middle school.

“When I was in junior high school, I was totally entranced by the NASA program,” Hillary Clinton said. “I wanted to go into space and wrote off a letter and NASA wrote back and said ‘sorry, we don’t take women.’ ”

Panelists touted Google’s Made with Code Initiative, a $50 million investment by the company to close the gender gap in technology jobs by encouraging girls to learn code. The initiative was announced last week in New York with Chelsea Clinton and comedian Mindy Kaling.

Only about 17 percent of Google’s technical workforce are women, according to statistics released by the company last month. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show that 20 percent of the country’s software developers are women.

Participants at the event on Monday received a poster board with statistics that said women in the U.S. held just one in four STEM jobs in 2011 and about 18 percent of computer science graduates in 2010 were women, compared with 37 percent in 1984.

And, Clinton said only 6,000 out of 30,000 public U.S. high schools offer advanced placement computer science classes, further reducing choices for young women.

During the event, girls and women shared stories about not being called on by teachers in math and science classes and being treated poorly by some of their male peers when they excelled in such classes.

“In my math and science classes, the teachers usually always picked boys to answer questions, which really bugged me because I knew the answers,” said Angela Chavez, a student in Aurora Public Schools. “It feels good to know that there are women out there who have had the same experiences and they made it.”

One engineering student said a professor pulled her aside and told her she should consider another career because she “just wasn’t smart enough.” Another middle schooler, Emily Lane, said she was called a goody two-shoes by classmates when she correctly answered questions.

Lane called the event “a good pep talk.”

“This is an amazing conversation for girls everywhere,” she said. “It’s a good pep talk to show that girls are brilliant and to find ways to acknowledge and respect their contributions.”

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